Joëlle said that the sky was crying this morning, because we were leaving our friends. It was true. It drizzled all the way from Aurélie’s apartment to our hotel in Paris, where Marc and Joëlle left us for their adventures in Southern France and Italy. It was difficult to part – the time with our friends went too quickly. We are lucky to have such great friends.

Visiting Paris, trying to see as much as possible in a small amount of time is a bit like “Whack-A-Mole”. You go to a Metro station, go underground and come up somewhere else. You look around a bit, then go another Metro station. That’s basically what we did in our short time in Paris.

The Hotel Camille is close to the Gare de Lyon train and metro stations; the next stop on the Metro is the Bastille monument. The elevator in the hotel is tiny, with a door that one has to push open. The final day of the Tour de France bicycle race was the next day; we saw the grandstands and decorations along the Champ-Élysées as we walked toward the Louvre.

We tried to see the famous places that Brian has never visited, although Clare saw them when she was here with her mother in 2007.

The Metro line we rode the most was fully automated and often very crowded. The Paris city hall (Hotel de Ville) is a fancy building; the Olympics are coming to Paris in 2024.

The many pyramids at the Louvre provide an interesting contrast to the older museum buildings.

Of course we walked along the Seine River and saw Norte Dame, which is being reconstructed after the devastating fire a couple of years ago.

We decided to find the very old house (built in 1407) that belonged to Nicolas Flamel, a scribe and alchemist whose work was mentioned in the Harry Potter books. Along the way we found colorful umbrellas at a sidewalk cafe and the colorful pipes on the outside of the Pompidou Center.

Luxembourg Gardens is near the university area where Brian’s father studied in the 1950s.

Brian hiked up Montmarte hill to see the Basilica of the Sacred Heart (Sacré Coeur) while Clare stayed at the cafe where we had lunch. This was close to Gare de Nord, our departure station to Brussels in the evening.

• Europe 2022